Domestic appliances with a treatment container, such as dishwashers, washing machines and ovens, are nowadays commercially available in a wide variety of forms. In a typical design, a container door which is pivotable about a horizontal pivot axis is provided which can be moved to a closed position to seal the treatment container and to an open position for filling or emptying the treatment container.
To make the domestic appliance as user-friendly as possible, door-weight compensating devices are used by means of which the weight of the container door is at least partially compensated when it is opening and closed. For example, such door-weight compensating devices on the one hand restrain the door opening movement so that, when it is folded down, the container door does not fall unchecked into its open position under its own weight, and, on the other hand, assist the door closing movement so that the user does not have to overcome the full weight of the container door in order to swivel it to its closed position. Rather it often usually suffices for the user to initiate the closing movement, and the container door then closes automatically as a result of the door-weight compensating device.
A generic domestic appliance is described in the Applicant's published unexamined German patent application DE 196 11 051 A1. In the domestic appliance shown there, the treatment container door which is pivotable about a horizontal pivot axis is pivotally mounted on a hinge plate which is in turn fixed in a base support serving as a base for installing the domestic appliance. The door-weight compensating device, which is disposed on both sides of the domestic appliance, comprises a tension spring attached at one end to the base support, and a tension cable, one end of which is connected to the other end of the spring. The other end of the tension cable is suspended from a lever arm of a pivotable hinge lever to whose other lever arm the front door is attached. The hinge lever is pivotally mounted on the hinge plate. The tension cable thus connecting the tension spring to the hinge lever, i.e. the container door, is threaded through a deflector mounted on the base support to deflect the cable pulling direction. If the container door is folded down into its open position, the hinge lever is carried along and the tension spring is tensioned via the suspended tension cable so that the opening movement of the container door is braked. If the container door is folded up into its closed position, the tensioned spring is unloaded and assists the closing movement with its spring force.
In the door-weight compensating device shown in DE 196 11 051 A1, the deflector for the tension cable is pivotally mounted about a pivot axis on the hinge plate fitted in the base support. The disadvantage of this in manufacturing terms is that the deflector must first be pre-fitted to the hinge plate and only then can the hinge plate be fixed to the base support. In addition, the tension spring is accommodated in a spring channel formed inside the base support and only accessible from the bottom. For the manufacturing process, this means that when the hinge plate provided with the pre-fitted deflector has been fixed to the base support, the base support must first be rotated to enable the tension spring with the thereto attached tension cable to be inserted from below into the corresponding spring channel, which involves a considerable amount of time and effort for the fitter. On the other hand, the tension cable must subsequently be threaded into the already fitted deflector, which tends to prove difficult and relatively time consuming.
In the generic DE 196 11 051 A1, the attachment of the deflector to the hinge plate is not described in greater detail. This has hitherto been implemented by the Applicant in industrial-scale production in such a way that a pivot bolt with a lug projecting perpendicularly therefrom is provided for this purpose on the deflector. Said pivot bolt is inserted through a keyhole-shaped slot in the hinge plate and turned such that the lug engages behind the slot in the hinge plate, thereby ensuring that the deflector is secured in its axial position. For this reason, however, the deflector cannot be implemented as an identical part that can be used both on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side of the domestic appliance. In large-scale industrial production, this has the disadvantage that both a “left-hand” deflector and a “right-hand” deflector must be held available, which increases manufacturing and warehousing costs.